Earlier reports, quoting a mine official at the scene, had said three workers were killed in the accident, but the Arizona-based firm denied any deaths had occurred.

Rescue efforts were under way at the remote Grasberg mine in West Papua province. Output at the mine, which also has the world's largest gold reserves and employs just over 24,000 contract and non-contract workers, was not expected to be significantly affected, the company said.

Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano has blown steam for days, prompting authorities to prepare for possible evacuations, but residents are used to their towering neighbor’s rumblings and keep going to work without fear.

Popocatepetl, which means “smoking mountain” in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, spewed more steam, gas and ash that rose three kilometers (two miles) above the crater on Tuesday, according to the National Disaster Prevention Center.

The volcano, which is 55 kilometers (34 miles) southeast of Mexico City, has also rumbled and spewed molten rocks in recent days. Last week, it covered several towns in ash, including the capital of the state of Puebla.

The offices of oil companies Shell, BP and Statoil have been raided by authorities as the European Commission investigates allegations of possible market manipulation of oil and biofuel prices.

The commission said it had launched the investigation over suspected anti-competitive agreements related to the submission of prices to Platts, the world's leading oil pricing agency.

"Officials carried out unannounced inspections at the premises of several companies active in and providing services to the crude oil, refined oil products and biofuels sectors," the EU's executive arm said in a statement.

Several manholes exploded in Brooklyn on Monday, setting cars on fire and sending people running for their safety.

As CBS 2’s Alice Gainer reported, dozens of families were left without power following the explosions in Bushwick on Monday afternoon. As late as 9 p.m., power was still out for several customers, and smoke was still billowing on and off from one of the manholes that exploded.

Not one, and not two, but three manhole covers blew along Menahan Street near Wyckoff Avenue, witnesses said.

The EU referendum bill is 490 words long with the Scottish Independence Referendum bill is over 62 thousand words. It´s evident, this bill was scrawled up on the back of an envelope in a few hours, and it is meaningless.

Chinese health officials have reported that three people have died recently from the new strain of H7N9 bird flu virus raising the death toll to 35. The number of people infected has already risen to 130. The World Health Organization said that this new strain is one of the most deadly viruses around and seem to have originated in China’s east Jiangxi province.

Health officials in the country say that there is no evidence of human to human transmission and that people contaminated with the virus got it from poultry. WHO officials however say that 40 percent of the people infected with the H7N9 bird flu virus didn’t come into contact with poultry. They also said that 57 people infected with the virus have already recovered.

This new strain of the virus was first detected in March has caused prices for poultry in China to drop.

A Mayan pyramid that has stood for 2,300 years in Belize has been reduced to rubble, apparently to make fill for roads.

Local media in the Central American country of 334,000 people report the temple at the Noh Mul site in northern Belize was largely torn down by backhoes and bulldozers last week.

"This is one of the worst that I have seen in my entire 25 years of archaeology in Belize," John Morris, an archaeologist with the country's Institute of Archaeology, told local channel 7NewsBelize. "We can't salvage what has happened out here -- it is an incredible display of ignorance."

For the second time in as many days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under fire over the use of taxpayers’ money after it was revealed that spending at his official residence has increased by 80 per cent in just the last three years.

The latest embarrassment comes just 48 hours after it was revealed that Mr Netanyahu ordered that a bedroom, complete with double bed, be specially fitted to the plane he used to fly to London last month to attend the funeral of Baroness Thatcher – at a cost to the Israeli taxpayer of $127,000, for the five and a half hour flight.

Mr Netanyahu spent a total of 5.43 million shekels (£975,000) on his household in 2012, up from 3.02 million in 2009. The prime minister is likely to be accused of profligacy with public funds, especially at a time when the latest Israeli budget, which passed through the Knesset on Monday, imposes income tax hikes and big cuts in public and military spending.

Human Rights Watch and the Syrian opposition National Coalition have condemned a gruesome video apparently showing a Syrian rebel fighter cutting out the heart of a regime soldier and eating it.

"International news agencies and social media websites have been circulating a video clip in which a person claiming to be a member of the rebels in Homs performs a horrific and inhumane act," the National Coalition said.

"The Syrian Coalition strongly condemns this act -- if it is revealed to be true. The Coalition stresses that such an act contradicts the morals of the Syrian people, as well as the values and principles of the Free Syrian Army."

A blast that killed three people in Libya's second city Benghazi was caused by fishing explosives that detonated accidentally, not a car bomb as originally thought, a local government official said on Tuesday.

But rights activists said the incident was symptomatic of deteriorating security in a country whose government exerts scant authority beyond the capital Tripoli and which is largely split into fiefs of armed groups that were instrumental in the 2011 revolution that ousted dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

"The vehicle belonged to a fisherman, who was killed in the blast caused by the explosive materials he was carrying in his car," Tarik Bozribe, a Benghazi city councilor, told Reuters. Libyan fisherman often use explosives to snare their catch.

Prime Minister David Cameron faced questions about his leadership on Tuesday after he buckled to pressure from within the Conservative Party to bring forward draft legislation enforcing a referendum on Britain's European Union membership.

Just hours after U.S. President Barack Obama cautioned against rushing towards the EU exit, Cameron was forced by a rebellion in his party into promising a bill that would pave the way for an in-out vote on Europe.

But the more Cameron concedes to his Eurosceptic lawmakers, the more they want, deepening the 25-year battle in his party over Europe and undermining his own chances of leading the party to victory in a general election set for 2015.

European authorities have raided offices of oil majors Shell, BP and Statoil as part of a probe into suspected manipulation of oil prices, one of the biggest cross-border actions since the Libor rigging scandal.

Authorities have sharply raised scrutiny of financial benchmarks around the world since slapping large fines on some of the world's biggest banks for rigging two interest rate benchmarks - Libor and Euribor.

On Tuesday, the European Commission said it was investigating major oil companies over suspected anti-competitive agreements related to submission of prices to Platts, the world's leading oil pricing agency and part of McGraw Hill Group (MHFI.N).

Russia declared a U.S. diplomat accused of seeking to recruit a Russian intelligence officer "persona non grata" on Tuesday and ordered him to leave the country.

"Such provocative actions in the spirit of the Cold War will by no means promote the strengthening of mutual trust," the Foreign Ministry said after a Russian security agency said a diplomat had been caught trying to recruit an intelligence officer as a spy.

A Syrian rebel leader who apparently took a bite from a soldier’s heart was today accused of committing a war crime by mutilating a body.

A group loyal to president Bashar Assad, which published a video clip of the act on the internet, described the act as a “crime that crosses all lines”.

The man, identified by Human Rights Watch as Abu Sakkar, a well-known insurgent from the city of Homs, is seen carving into the soldier’s body and cutting out the heart and liver.

He then says: “I swear to God we will eat your hearts out, you soldiers of Bashar. You dogs. God is greater... we will take out their hearts to eat them.” He then appears to put the heart in his mouth and takes a bite.

Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch said: “The mutilation of the bodies of enemies is a war crime. But the even more serious issue is the very rapid descent into sectarian rhetoric and violence.”

Derrick Twardoski, 33, knew the children's parents and family members say he was exercising a vendetta because the tires of the cars in the driveway were slashed at the home in Percy, Illinois. Ethan Owen, 12, Kailey Owen, 9 and five-year-old twins Brandon and Landon Owen perished in their beds during the 2am blaze.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, who ran the now-shuttered Women's Medical Society Clinic, had been charged with four counts of capital murder in the deaths of babies whose spinal cords he was accused of snipping to bring about their deaths. He was found not-guilty on one charge, but each of the first-degree capital murder charges could earn him the death penalty. He was also found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, a refugee who died after a drug overdose following an abortion in November 2010.

One of Britain’s biggest water companies has become the target of a takeover bid by an overseas consortium that values the firm at more than £5billion.

Seven Trent Water, which supplies 4.2million households and businesses across the Midlands and parts of Wales, confirmed it had received an approach from a joint venture consisting of the Canadian investment group Borealis, the Kuwait Investment Office and Universities Superannuation Scheme.

The deal for the FTSE 100 company would make it the latest British utility to fall into foreign ownership.

A battle between rival religious power centres over Egypt’s institutions and the nature of its Muslim identity threatens economic and political stability in the Arab world’s most populous country.

While Egypt observers have fixated on the battle between secularists and Islamists as the defining fact of political life since the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi won the presidency last year, some analysts say there is an equally intense contest between competing religious groups.

Greek public sector workers have walked out of their jobs over government threats to arrest teachers planning to go on strike, potentially disrupting nationwide university entrance exams.

Authorities have served orders on some 88,000 staff - the third time such action has been taken by the embattled government.

In protest against the action, state workers shut down schools and bureaus on Tuesday, including tax offices, as part of a 24 hour nationwide strike. State hospitals were also affected with reduced staff.

SOCHI, May 14 (RIA Novosti) - Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on a brief working visit to Russia, met on Tuesday to discuss the situation in Syria and the Middle East, with missile deliveries likely to be on the agenda.

Putin said at the start of the meeting that he expects the discussions to focus on Syria, but did not mention Russia's arms deliveries.

Netanyahu suggested discussing “ways to bring stability to this region, to make it safer, to make it more peaceful.”

it looks like we've found an early winner of BART's new banning policy: This afternoon a man was reportedly see roving naked through the 16th Street BART "spitting and pissing."

Marc Huestis, who documented the acrobatics and water sports in the photo below, claims the station was shut down, although we couldn't immediately confirm that with BART PD. There was, however, a service advisory saying there would be 15-minute delays at the 24th Street station on the Daly City line one stop down.

A rebel leader from Homs is filmed cutting out and biting the heart of a dead government soldier. The insurgents chant 'God is Great' as the man appears to cut away in order to remove his victims internal organs. As he raises the organ to his mouth he threatens to eat the hearts of government troops. Strangely this isn't the first case of alleged cannibalism on the part of Syrian insurgents. It's hard to be certain as to the motivations behind such acts.

On May 13th some human rights lawyers visited Ere Lake
legal education center in Ziyang, China.
They were beaten up by plainclothes policemen,
then forcibly taken to Yingjie police station.
No one knows where they are now.

German labor union Verdi called on workers at Amazon.com to stage a strike in the country on Tuesday to put pressure on the global internet retailer to improve pay and benefits.

Amazon employs around 9,000 people in Germany and has come under fire from trade union Verdi for refusing to implement a collective agreement on employment conditions, similar to other mail order and retail firms.

Spain and Portugal called on Monday for the euro zone to complete a banking union as Germany underscored legal hurdles before a central element of the plan to deal with failing banks can be introduced.

"It is indispensable that we stick to the agreed calendar on banking union and that we take steps to make sure families and small companies receive credit," Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told reporters.

"Banking union is the credibility test of the European Union," he said, after meeting Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, who backed his calls for progress on Europe's most ambitious reform of the financial crisis.

The call came as finance ministers from the euro zone met in Brussels, ahead of which German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble reiterated the need for a change to EU treaties to underpin the new system of bank resolution.

An unknown number of workers at the Indonesian unit of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc are trapped underground after a tunnel collapsed at the world's second-largest copper mine, a statement from the Arizona-based firm said on Tuesday.

Freeport Indonesia operates the Grasberg mine in west Papua province, which also has the world's largest gold reserves and employs just over 24,000 contract and non-contract workers.

An emergency response and safety team are now conducting a search and rescue, the Freeport statement said. There were no details on the number of workers trapped or casualties, and whether mine output had been affected.

A boat carrying about 100 Rohingya Muslims capsized off western Myanmar with many feared drowned at the start of a mass evacuation from low-lying regions ahead of Cyclone Mahasen, a U.N. official said on Tuesday.

The boat struck rocks off Pauktaw township in Rakhine State and sank late on Monday, Barbara Manzi, head of the Myanmar office at the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told Reuters.

The video starts out like so many of the dozens coming out of the war in Syria every day, with the camera hovering over the body of a dead Syrian soldier. But the next frame makes it clear why this video, smuggled out of the city of Homs and into Lebanon with a rebel fighter, and obtained by TIME in April, is particularly shocking. In the video a man who is believed to be a rebel commander named Khalid al-Hamad, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Sakkar, bends over the government soldier, knife in hand. With his right hand he moves what appears to be the dead man’s heart onto a flat piece of wood or metal lying across the body. With his left hand he pulls what appears to be a lung across the open cavity in the man’s chest. According to two of Abu Sakkar’s fellow rebels, who said they were present at the scene, Abu Sakkar had cut the organs out of the man’s body. The man believed to be Abu Sakkar then works his knife through the flesh of the dead man’s torso before he stands to face the camera, holding an organ in each hand. “I swear we will eat from your hearts and livers, you dogs of Bashar,” he says, referring to supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Off camera, a small crowd can be heard calling out “Allahu akbar” — God is great. Then the man raises one of the bloodied organs to his lips and starts to tear off a chunk with his teeth.

North Korea has replaced its hardline defence chief with a little-known army general, according to a state media report, in what outside analysts call an attempt to solidify Kim Jong-un's grip on the powerful military.

Jang Jong-nam's appointment is seen as the latest move by Kim aimed at trying to consolidate control since succeeding his late father in 2011. The announcement comes as tensions eased after weeks of warlike threats between North and South Korea, including vows of nuclear strikes from the North.

Pyongyang's rhetorical outbursts against massive US and South Korean war drills and UN sanctions over the North's February nuclear test were seen, in part, as a push to portray Kim at home as a respected military commander on the world stage.

A judge said Monday there is good cause to let Colorado movie theater shooting suspect James Holmes change his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity.

But Judge Carlos Samour Jr. said he will not rule until other matters are resolved, possibly later this month.

Previously, a judge entered a standard plea of not guilty for Holmes, who faces charges in the July 20, 2012, shooting spree in Aurora that took the lives of 12 people and wounded dozens more at the premiere of the Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises."

A young US engineer found dead in his Singapore flat last year had accessed several websites on suicide and depression, a lawyer for the city state told an official inquiry into his death.

The coroner's inquiry, which opened on Monday, comes after months of uncertainty over the fate of Shane Todd, who had been employed by a Singapore government research agency at the time of his death, aged 31.

He was found hanging from the bathroom door in his apartment in June, two days after he had left his job at the agency, the Institute of Microelectronics (IME). He had been working on the development of gallium nitride, a substance with both commercial and military uses.

Rage grew in a Turkish town on Syria's border Monday in the aftermath of weekend bombings as the government blamed Marxists with Syrian connections for the deadly attacks.

Gathered before the ruins left when two explosive-laden cars went off Saturday, residents of Reyhanli called on Turkey's government to step down, alleging that it has gotten their country too involved Syria's troubles.

Hours later, rescuers pulled another corpse from the rubble and placed it in a black body back for transit, said CNN Senior International Correspondent Ben Wedeman. It brought the death toll to at least 47. Another 100 or so have been injured, authorities have said.

Ever since H. G. Wells' trailblazing novel "The Time Machine," time travel has been a staple of science fiction. The idea of traveling through time is deeply fascinating: you get into a machine, press a few buttons, and step out not just somewhere else, but "somewhen" else. It's easy to imagine, but can it really be done?

Yes it can, at least in a limited sense. Over a century ago, Albert Einstein showed that time is intrinsically elastic, capable of being stretched or shrunk by motion. Fly from London to New York and back, and you will leap a split second into the future of stay-at-home Londoners. The effect can easily be measured using atomic clocks and involves only billionths of a second -- too brief for a person to notice, and hardly the stuff of "Doctor Who" television series-style adventures.

But time stretching can be magnified by increasing the speed. Close to the speed of light (about 300,000 kilometers per second), time warps become startling. Fly to the star Vega, 25 light years away, and back again at 99% of the speed of light, and when you return to Earth in 2062, you will have experienced only seven years travel time in the spacecraft. In effect, you will have leaped 42 years into Earth's future.

The FBI last month gave temporary security clearances to scores of U.S. bank executives to brief them on the investigation into the cyber attacks that have repeatedly disrupted online banking websites for most of a year.

Bank security officers and others were brought to more than 40 field offices around the country to join a classified video conference on "who was behind the keyboards," Federal Bureau of Investigation Executive Assistant Director Richard McFeely told the Reuters Cybersecurity Summit on Monday.

The extraordinary clearances, from an agency famed for being close-mouthed even among other law enforcement agencies, reflect some action after years of talk about the need for increased cooperation between the public and private sectors on cybersecurity.

Dear General Holder:
I am writing to object in the strongest possible terms to a massive and unprecedented
intrusion by the Department of Justice into the newsgathering activities of The Associated
Press.

Last Friday afternoon, AP General Counsel Laura Malone received a letter from the office
of United States Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. advising that, at some unidentified time
earlier this year, the Department obtained telephone toll records for more than 20 separate
telephone lines assigned to the AP and its journalists. The records that were secretly
obtained cover a full two-month period in early 2012 and, at least as described in Mr.
Machen’s letter, include all such records for, among other phone lines, an AP general
phone number in New York City as well as AP bureaus in New York City, Washington, D.C.,
Hartford, Connecticut, and at the House of Representatives. This action was taken without
advance notice to AP or to any of the affected journalists, and even after the fact no notice
has been sent to individual journalists whose home phones and cell phone records were
seized by the Department.

There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone
communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal
communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities
undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s
newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations
that the government has no conceivable right to know.

That the Department undertook this unprecedented step without providing any notice to
the AP, and without taking any steps to narrow the scope of its subpoenas to matters
actually relevant to an ongoing investigation, is particularly troubling.

The sheer volume of records obtained, most of which can have no plausible connection to
any ongoing investigation, indicates, at a minimum, that this effort did not comply with 28
C.F.R. §50.10 and should therefore never have been undertaken in the first place. The
regulations require that, in all cases and without exception, a subpoena for a reporter’s
telephone toll records must be “as narrowly drawn as possible.’’ This plainly did not
happen.

We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news. While we evaluate our options we urgently request that you immediately return to the AP the telephone toll records that the Department subpoenaed and destroy all copies. At a minimum, we request that you take steps to segregate these records and prohibit any reference to them pending further discussion and, if it proves necessary, guidance from appropriate judicial authorities. We also ask for an immediate explanation as to why this extraordinary action was taken, and a description of the steps the Department will take to mitigate its impact on AP and its reporters.
Given the gravity of this situation, I look forward to your prompt response.
Sincerely,

New Orleans police on Monday identified a suspect in connection with a shooting at a Mother's Day parade that injured 19 people, including two children, as residents expressed outrage over the violence.

Police said the suspect, 19-year-old Akein Scott, remained at large but had been identified by multiple people.

"The time has come for him to turn himself in," New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas said.

The Associated Press said on Monday the U.S. government secretly seized telephone records of AP offices and reporters for a two-month period in 2012, describing the acts as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into news-gathering operations.

AP Chief Executive Gary Pruitt, in a letter posted on the agency's website, said the AP was informed last Friday that the Justice Department gathered records for more than 20 phone lines assigned to the news agency and its reporters.

"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters," Pruitt said in the letter addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder.

An AP story on the records seizure said the government would not say why it sought them.

Another volcano in Alaska is heating up, with seismic instruments signaling a possible eruption, scientists said Monday.

Tremors were detected at Pavlof Volcano, 625 miles southwest of Anchorage, according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Satellite imagery showed the mountain was "very, very hot," said John Power, the U.S. Geological Survey scientist in charge at the observatory.

The aviation alert level for Pavlof was raised from "yellow" to "orange." A major ash emission could threaten international flights.

Pavlof is 37 miles from the community of Cold Bay, which was notified of the new activity that began about 8 a.m. Monday. Because of clouds, the volcano was not visible to the village of 100.